Cleopatra�s Perfume

by Jina Bacarr

  Wiping the light sweat off the back of my neck, I had to remind myself that it was autumn. I arrived early to the party, as had several others, including a dapper, older gentleman (one of the few in attendance not in uniform) who asked me if I was Flavia’s school chum. I lowered my eyes, wondering who he was, though I was secretly flattered by his remark. No, I answered, wetting my red lips. I was a friend of Lady Palmer, I told him, which drew an intake of breath on his part and a glance up and down my slim body as well as an invitation to supper if I was free tomorrow. I accepted his invitation. He was a family friend from Canada, I discovered, here in London on business.

  For the Foreign Office? I dared to ask. He smiled as if I’d guessed correctly, but he wouldn’t admit to anything. I was already tipsy and high when I bounced off what I considered a witty remark about how Sir_____ had approached me to be a spy.

  “Did I hear you say you’re going to be a spy, Lady Marlowe?” Flavia asked, joining us. Her look of surprise then delight lifted her arched brows, brightening her delicate features with a sensuality most becoming to her.

  Picking up a glass of chilled wine, I said, “No, dear, I turned him down. I’m not the Mata Hari type.”

  “You’re beautiful enough to be a spy, milady,” she added with a sincerity that surprised me, then taking me by the elbow and begging the gentleman to allow her to steal me away, she led me over toward an occupied banquette set against a wall of mirrors so we could talk privately. “And you have courage.”

  “Whatever are you talking about, Flavia?” I asked, curious.

  “I’ll never forget how you stood up to that Egyptian in Port Said and saved me from making a fool out of myself.” She paused, her forehead wrinkling, her body shuddering, as she professed to repeat the lamentable story of that entire erotic episode, disturbing me.

  “Flavia,” I insisted, “there’s no reason for you to say anything to anyone about what happened.” I prayed she wasn’t of the mind to yield to every caprice of a young girl to exaggerate her holiday adventures in order to sound mature. I need not have been alarmed.

  “My whole life would have been ruined if it hadn’t been for your intervention,” she protested with utmost indignation. “I never would have met Tommy and be as happy as I am tonight.”

  “Flavia, I—I…”

  “I owe you so much, Lady Marlowe,” she said with conviction. “I can never repay you.”

  I would remember those words long after this night, echoing in my head over and over for days to come, but at this moment her praise embarrassed me so I changed the subject.

  “Where is Lady Palmer?” I asked, looking around the restaurant and not seeing the doting form of the girl’s mother.

  “Mummy will be round soon. She’s bringing my birthday present with her.” Flavia leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I know what it is.”

  “You do?” I asked, pretending to be shocked. I knew what it was, but at Lady Palmer’s request, I’d kept the secret.

  “She’s bringing Tommy. He’s home on special leave. We’re to be married next week.” She swooned, wrapping her arms around herself and imagining him already pressed against her swelling breasts and giving free rein to the warm caresses she had held so long in check. “I can’t wait to see him.”

  “I know you’ll both be very happy,” I said, meaning it, but the drama erupted into something I never expected. Jealousy. Not of the girl. I was indeed happy for her. But my instinctive, primitive need for the happiness of such a love turned my mood so low I slid down into the somber depths of a despair I hadn’t experienced in years. I no longer saw myself as a seductress in white satin, but a lonely woman without love, a woman who substituted the white powder for happiness.

  We hugged each other and Flavia commented on the rich scent of my perfume. Chatting about how much she liked the exotic spiciness and she was sure Tommy would like it, and where could she buy a bottle? What could I say? It was two thousand years old and once belonged to a beautiful Egyptian queen? Call me a sentimental fool, but I decided to give her a small amount of the perfume for a wedding present, but not mention its mystical power. After all, dear reader, I never would have entered into this adventure if Flavia hadn’t found herself enamored of the handsome Egyptian, would I?

  I snapped open my clutch to retrieve the perfume I carried with me, when a sudden urge to partake of the drug hit me. I understood its power over me, most likely in moments of self-indulgence and depression to rouse my spirits and cheer me. But how to indulge my need without arousing Flavia’s suspicion?

  I asked her to scan the guests to see if Lady Palmer had arrived. She stood up, shielding me from curious stares while I dipped my nails into the small compact I carried and sniffed the cocaine up my nose. You know its effects. Fast, immediate. An overwhelming sense of euphoria that satisfied my hunger for what I didn’t have. The love of a man.

  I can’t explain my mood that night, dear reader. Silly, fearful, a creature of my circumstances, shameless and totally demoralized. I didn’t question what reality I was in since I was high when—

  A vivid blue flash illuminated where I was sitting, striking me in the face, a severe pressure on the top of my head, then complete darkness. The last thing I remember was the rumble, shaking, a maddening echo of raucous noise, then an explosion of such force that the banquette I was sitting on jettisoned into the air and I disappeared.

  I landed on the ground near a row of houses burning, small cottages, the type with torn lace curtains hanging lopsided on the windows. Narrow, crowded strips of terraced homes between the docks and factories, dingy and squalid, where hardworking, decent families from the laboring class lived. Needless to say, dear reader, I experienced the same deadening of my senses, the smell of spices mixing with the horrible stench of smoke and I feared also that of burning flesh. I recovered more quickly this time, surprising me, and pulled myself up to my feet. I looked around at the great blazing red flames licking up against the brick walls, piles of houses collapsed or on fire. Nothing but empty shells. Not a single house had a roof, and in one instance, leaving a wall standing alone with a broken staircase rising up and leading to nowhere. I saw bedroom furniture hanging precariously, waiting for the floor to give way. Old, shabby furniture and long tin baths littering the roadway, reduced to kindling. I knew where I was. Tulip Street in Silverton. East London. I’d picked up my drugs near here last week in the dirty backroom of a small pub.

  I turned and started walking toward the docks. Looking, listening, smelling. I didn’t sense immediate danger here, though that could change at any moment. Over there, yes, I could see the pub, that building without anything on top of it and a fallen lamppost blocking the front door. I thought about the old soldier with the wooden leg tossing darts and telling dirty stories about his days at the front before slipping me the small glassine bag of white powder. Was he trapped inside? No, I imagined he was, like the rest of London, scrambling for their lives amid the horror.

  A powerful, disturbing thought sent me into a panic. I was nowhere near the restaurant in Piccadilly. The perfume must have brought me here, though why I didn’t understand since I believed danger still haunted me, my body shaking, my white evening gown and bare arms taking on dust and grit and covering me with a sheer veil of black soot from head to toe. Which meant a bomb must have hit the restaurant—

  Flavia.

  No, dear God, no. Not that, not her. I wouldn’t believe it. I couldn’t. Tortured cries escaped from my throat, my mouth moving but no words coming out. I must think. Think. Yes, she was standing in front of me while I sat on the upholstered bench along the wall of mirrors, sniffing cocaine off the tips of my nails. I’d planned to rub perfume on the inside of her wrist, but I didn’t. I didn’t. A moment, no more than two, and I could have saved Flavia if I hadn’t been so enamored of the white powder, so desperate for its euphoric effect that I allowed this disease to obsess me, devour me, destroy—not me, but a beautiful young woman who had everything to live f
or. Then the next instant, I found my self here. The perfume saved me. Then that meant Flavia—

  I started screaming and couldn’t stop.

  I wandered through the deserted streets around the docks for hours, still in shock, the skyline a shifting orange glow tinged with scarlet, timber stacked twenty feet high burning in front of me. A startling crackling made me hold my ears, though I couldn’t stop looking at the huge fire. I saw ambulances trying to get through the pitch-black streets, going around huge craters in the roadway, helping the injured, cramming as many as fifteen injured people into a conveyance, while I made my way through rubble in an acrid fog of fumes and dust. I did what I could, tying bandages, carrying stretchers with the wounded, helping rescue a mother and her two-day-old baby from the rubble, all in deathly silence since nobody spoke. We did our jobs against the background of a ghastly glow, our faces turning an ashen gray from the anguish of what we saw. Like the city of London, I stood vulnerable against the enemy, unable to believe what I was seeing. Fires everywhere.

  I learned later the first wave of bombers in the East End was only the beginning of the nightmare. When the bombs started a fire, the German aircraft immediately returned and used it as a target, dropping more bombs in hopes of spreading the fire. Shrapnel rained down in constant sheets from the antiaircraft barrage, its sharp slivers diving into innocent flesh and ripping it open. I wasn’t dressed for battle, my nakedness apparent in a backless evening gown, my disbelief open like a wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding. I wasn’t hurt, but someone threw a blanket over my shoulders to cover me. I could be burned or worse in this sea of flame rising above the docks, the fires so intense the water hoses were useless.

  I didn’t know it then, but the docks had been the main target, though stray bombers unable to aim exactly in the smoke and flames got off target and hit as far as the row houses in Tottenham in north London. Most likely some Luftwaffe pilots were anxious to drop their bombs and flee before they were hit, which explained their indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets. Like the underground restaurant where I was that took the brunt of a bomb.

  The next wave of bombers began two hours later, the scream of the banshee piercing my ears with a second battle cry as the siren wailed and wailed and wailed without stopping and they came again like avenging creatures of the night, so bent on destruction nothing could stop them.

  Making my way through the rubble, looking for any sign of life, I prayed I would be strong, as I knew London would be in the days and weeks to come, and look past the ruins of the churches, hospitals, homes, and face this strange new world with a calmness I’d yet to experience, a confidence I must find and a courage fused by what I had seen. The bombs had killed Flavia and hundreds of others, but they cannot and will not kill their spirit.

  It wasn’t until the next morning around dawn (the bombers didn’t stop coming until 4:00 a.m.) when I was able to get a lift with an ambulance headed back to Mayfair. I had done what I could to help the wounded and injured, I told Mrs. Wills, but I kept repeating to her I could have saved Flavia, if only I hadn’t been so selfish, so desperate for the drug. I wasn’t making sense, she insisted, taking charge and wrapping me up in the embryonic silk of her voice, like waves of the sea, rising, rolling, curving around me to comfort me, to renew me; but like the sea, my mind was rolling infinitely and ebbing back, back toward the battered wrecks of bricks and rubble caused by the fire, the stench and destruction that singed my mind with the horror of what I had seen, what I had done, what I could have done but didn’t because of my addiction, and the price this young girl had paid for my folly.

  I pulled away from Mrs. Wills, wetness streaming down my face as if I had released the fetid poison from my soul through the emotion of my tears, liberating me from this world where I had trapped myself. I rushed upstairs to my bedroom. I slashed through the fine white silks and peach satins neatly folded in my bureau in perfect squares until I located my cache of white powder. I ripped it out of its safe holding place and, like a madwoman, I tried to open the sealed wooden box, rid myself of it, but I couldn’t. My hand shook, my lips trembled, my pulse raced so fast I felt faint. It was the demon still trying to possess me, making me pause, think.

  Don’t be a fool. You need the drug. Its stimulating effects, the rise in your intake of pleasure. Orgasmic euphoria. Don’t do this.

  No, I could no longer allow myself to be fooled by the power of this illusory garden of paradise. Foolhardy and fleeting. Whatever pain I must endure cutting into my flesh like crushed glass, I must fight its paralytic effects. I must.

  I raced into the bath and before I could listen to the sad echo of my former self trying to control me, I dumped the white powder down the drain. I had tried before to stop, rid myself of the drug, but then I had not destroyed all of it. This time I did. I stood there, watching every crystal dissolve into blankness, a transcendent dream that never really existed, like a poem without rhythm, without meaning. Mine was a life without meaning.

  Then I threw myself down on the bed and cried. And cried. And cried. Uncontrollably.

  St. Middleton’s Hospital

  North of London

  January 8, 1941

  St. Middleton’s Hospital wasn’t a hospital at all, but rather a Palladian country house located in an idyllic spot about an hour’s drive north of London amid manicured green hedgerows. Its capacious halls had shiny polished parquet floors, tempting patients to try their luck at indoor sliding contests during rainy afternoons. This sport more often than not prodded disapproving looks but nary a rebuttal from the young nurses in their gray cotton uniforms with big buttons accenting their waists and starched white pan collars with matching headpieces covering their hair. After all, who would dare rebuke Lord_____ or the duke of_____ or a member of Parliament for an afternoon joyride on the slick floor? These angels of mercy in gray flitted about their patients like curious honeybees around a flower, not daring to come too close, lest they damage the fragile petals of their minds. Lost in their own black-and-white worlds amid the colorful gardens of pink and yellow and violet, the patients chatted with the nurses about why they’d come here, many opening up for the first time in years, while others sat sullenly in their wooden and rattan wheelchairs and refused to accept the fact they had a problem.

  These patients were a queer breed, dear reader, many belonging to a pampered society from not so long ago who received their drugs from a chemist and sniffed their snuff and other drugs under the disinterested nose of polite society. Opiate dependence was looked upon as a vice more the province of privilege of the upper classes. Recent times changed that, and private, secluded places like St. Middleton’s did what families could not do: treat the addict and cure his addiction.

  I know.

  I was one of those addicts.

  I stood at the large bay window in the drawing room with the couches and armchairs upholstered in an intricate pearl-beige brocade and a snooker table at one end, watching a sudden shower turn into a light drizzle. Then the clouds cleared and the sun reappeared, only to give way to clouds again and the sky darkened and again came the rain. Mimicking my moods. At times I would feel normal; others, I regressed into a mad state when a clutching darkness closed in around me, my breath erratic, my mouth dry and hoarse. I fidgeted constantly with an edge of anxiety I couldn’t shake. I complained of what I believed were worms crawling all over my body and strange men following me everywhere. Touching me, tying me to bedposts, then applying cocaine to my genitals, causing a tingling that wouldn’t stop, making me writhe and groan until I thought I would lose my mind, but I couldn’t reach orgasm. Hallucinations, illusions, but real to me.

  How slow and cruel the hours seemed to me, dissolved as I was in bitter tears and racked by sobs. I wept for those killed in the bombing. I wept in fear of the horror of the war. I wept because I believed I would never leave this place, never know again the loving touch of a man’s kiss upon my lips, his hard body against mine. I thought I was having a nervous br
eakdown but I found out I was stronger than that, stronger than the drug. I was desperate and knew I couldn’t get better without help, so I agreed to partake of the vapor baths and salt rubs, as well as take medication with tongue-twisting names used in similar cases as mine to suppress the withdrawal symptoms. I shan’t attempt to remember them exactly, merely to state I believe they were administered to me as detoxification drugs.

  Besides the medication, the doctor insisted on trying something gaining wide acceptance in the treatment of addiction. Psychotherapy or as he called it, the “talking cure.” I shan’t spend needless time telling you the reasons behind my excessive behaviors. You’ve read my story. Put simply, because I didn’t find physical affection and acceptance growing up, I sought it through sex, challenging societal taboos and seeking to be recognized for myself. At St. Middleton’s, through hours and weeks and months of therapy, of the vigilant recording by the doctors and nurses of almost everything I said or did, I discovered that I am a worthwhile human being and worthy of the name and title I bear through the generosity of his lordship.

  I settled into the routine, and soon after I began my day after the doctor’s daily rounds with a puzzle. Sitting down at a small table in the library known for its rare books, I pieced together a bit more each day, watching the petals and stems and vase of the flower arrangement taking shape, while also seeing my life for what it was, my guilt over Flavia’s death becoming less pronounced each day, though I would never forget her. I could still see Lady Palmer’s clouded blue eyes questioning why I lived and her daughter didn’t since we were seen together right before the bomb hit. No one knew what happened to me after the bomb exploded until I showed up the next morning. Mrs. Wills was beside herself with worry, especially when the local post warden presented her with my clutch and gas mask, saying the fire brigade had found no other trace of me in the restaurant. I said nothing to her about my adventure. After all, who would believe the story of Cleopatra’s perfume? Except you, dear reader. Though, strangely, I experienced a loss of smell in the days afterward. As if the perfume didn’t work anymore. After conferring with the physician in charge here at the hospital, I believe it was due more to the sensitivity of the membranes in my nose from inhaling the drug than the perfume. He assured me it would return in due time.